Breaking barriers to progress

Human existence can seem at times like an obstacle course. Our education, careers, family relationships, income, children, can seem to reach points in development where the need for further progress is obvious but frustratingly out of reach.

When we are faced with such predicaments, a material sense of things may suggest that we try to overcome the barrier by sheer force, or that we look for some way around it. None of these approaches are necessary or effective. They're all based on the material assumption that the barriers are real.

They're not. As we learn to listen to spiritual sense -- the inherent consciousness of the ever-presence of infinite good, or God, that each of us possesses -- we can dissolve such barriers in the way shown us by Christ Jesus. They are only a temporary blindness to what is real.

What is real is the spiritual universe, including man as God's image and likeness -- a universe forever unified, forever reflecting all the infinite goodness and unimpeded action of God. This universe is always discernible to us sufficient degree to heal us, because God is our real Mind, our source of infinite intelligence. "As a drop of water is one with the ocean, a ray of light one with the sun," writes Mary Baker Eddy, n1 "even so God and man, Father and son, are one in being." And she adds, "The Scripture reads: 'For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.'" n2

n1 Mrs. Eddy is the Discover and Founder of Christian Science;

n2 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m p. 361

What seems to material sense to be a real barrier is a supposed separation, or vacuum, between God and man. Material sense, after all, is nothing but a wrong conviction that man, already created in spiritual perfection, has been recreated like Adam out of matter and separated from infinite good by material laws of limitation. Barriers from good are mental collections of "vaccums" that have been allowed to acumulate unchallenged in human thinking. Their apparent existence is dissoved as the Christly light of Truth is turned on them, revealing progressively man's indestructible unity with God.

Take children, for example, and the many barriers that material sense, in belief, has erected to frustrate their orderly development. Their proper nourishment and education is often portrayed as a strain on family or state resources -- as if they represented a negative contribution to society. Believing this can make it seem to be so, but it's far from the truth. Each idea of God is eternally complete, forever unfolding the Father's unlimited support of its needs.

Material sense will often claim that children are separated from their maturity -- from full control over their talents and capabilities -- because they haven't "lived" long enough. This particularly insidious belief would fragment a child's identity: reveal pieces of him that are not properly coordinated, or that aren't at consistent stages of development, or that aren't compatible with other pieces yet to appear. But the child has always lived and always will live, because he's in reality an immortal idea of eternal Life. His gradual appearing to a Christ-illumined sense of human existense is an unfoldment by degrees of his inseparably complete indentity: not a coming togetherm by degrees of sometimes irrelevant bits and pieces of him.

"Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord," n3 said Paul. There are no vacuums in God's universe, and no real barriers to right human progress.

n3 Romans 8:39.

DAILY BIBLE VERSE By my God have I leaped over a wall. II Samuel 2 2:30